In Manchuria (42 page)

The following week, Auntie Yi fumed on Red Flag Road.

“That’s what Eastern Fortune Rice did while you were in Hong Kong! I was going to plant poppies in that space!” She pointed with disgust at a stripe of green sod. A strand of gray hair spilled from her bucket hat and down her tanned cheek. “Now I’ll have to wait until the grass dies. Or just dig it up and put the flowers in anyway. They’ll know I did it. But this is village land, not their land. Look at that!”

We stared wordlessly at Wasteland’s first lawn.

Typically for a Chinese conversation, Auntie Yi slipped the bad news in only after asking about my trip to see Frances. “Is she pregnant yet? No? Well, San Jiu had a stroke.”

It had been minor, she said, and now he was resting at home. “Don’t disturb him,” she advised. “He’s in a terrible mood. He’s rarely sick, let alone experienced something this serious. Tomorrow morning he’ll go to the clinic for medicine. Go sit with him there.”

I ran the mile to his house at
6
:
00
a.m. only to find that San Jiu had biked to the clinic. I ran there. Young nurses in starched white uniforms asked me the usual questions—
American, Year of the Rat,
1
.
86
meters
—as I roamed the hall, looking in doors for San Jiu.

He lay in a room with four platform beds, each occupied by a man on his back, tethered to an IV line. A ceiling fan pushed the limpid air, and flies buzzed against the screened windows facing the village street. The horns of rumbling dump trucks bleated as they passed, sending plumes of dust into the room. When the saline bag emptied, the patient yelled, at the top of his voice, “
Huan yao!
” (“Change medicine!”)

San Jiu’s eyes lit up as I said hello and patted his arm; there was no hugging in Chinese families, even after a stroke.

“
Mei shi,
” San Jiu said, when I asked what happened. “It was nothing.” While out in the paddy checking for rice blast, he had felt “strange.” Two fingers on his left hand went numb. “I hoped it was a cramp,” he said. But when the sensation remained, he walked a mile by himself to the clinic. The triage nurse recognized his symptoms and called a doctor. An ambulance took him to a Jilin city hospital for a CT scan and further tests. He showed no lingering effects, but was to come to the clinic three times a week to receive an infusion of rehydration formula mixed with medicine. San Jiu did not know what kind. “
Mei shi
,” he repeated. (“No big deal.”)

A
man with a hand bandaged in white gauze slung around his neck asked where I had been. Another man, who had taken a liquor bottle to an eyebrow now sutured shut, shouted, “
Huan yao!
” A starched nurse entered and said, “Our clinic must look really poor to an American.” I replied, truthfully, that the clinic looked well-supplied, attentively staffed, and affordable, even for a farmer. But no one believed me.

I wondered how much San Jiu’s medical care cost and how I could let him know, in a roomful of people, that he should not worry about the bill.

Paying in China represented more than a financial transaction: merely picking up a restaurant check could lead to tableside scrums, climaxing with hand-slapping dashes to the register to toss down money first. Paying was a show of respect—and a deposit in the ledger of favors that balanced relationships. As a
laowai
, a foreigner, this account was all but closed to me. San Jiu had known the men in the room his entire life. He had lived through six decades of history with them. Through marriage we were family, but in situations like this I remained an outsider.

After I asked about the bill at the front desk, the clerk said the account had been settled. At lunch later that day, San Jiu’s cousin, who ran a local dumpling house, relayed the news that San Jiu had canceled our weekly dinner. “He told me to tell you it’s not convenient.”

“I told him he doesn’t have to cook. I’ll bring takeout from his favorite restaurant, the Korean barbecue.”

“It’s not convenient.”

Why? Was it about money, about face, about a joke I made, or something the clinic staff had said? I was baffled, and would have preferred San Jiu call me
shagua
—moron—as he often did, and say what I had done wrong.

I carefully mentioned the encounter to Auntie Yi. She clucked and said, “Everyone calls San Jiu
qiuzi
—slippery. That’s been his nickname for decades.”

I had never heard it before.

“You can never tell what’s going on with him,” she said. “Just show up for dinner and pretend nothing happened.”

I sat with him during his next appointments—flattering the nurses, humoring his wardmates—then did as Auntie Yi had instructed, arriving at his house for the meal carrying offerings of peaches, pork, walnuts, and chrysanthemum tea. Nothing was explained, but that night I ate dinner seated next to a hale and friendly San Jiu on his
kang
, munching flash-fried pork and garlic stems while kids ran in and out, the door slammed, and the Pekingese tried its best to be heard.

In mid-September the shadows lengthened on Red Flag Road, the foothills’ grass dried to a sandy brown, and the paddies turned yellow. At Wasteland’s elementary school, the children wore jackets at recess, and the blackboards cautioned against the coming frost of the solar term called White Dew.
PREVENT HAND, FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE
. Warnings that winter brought the biggest change in temperature could not be far behind.

For the first time since summer, I shaved, so kids wouldn’t want to paw and pull their furry teacher’s face. As I passed our intersection’s corner shop, its owner said hello and added, “There’s been a Libyan walking around here with a black beard.”

I was incredulous: another foreigner, let alone one from North Africa, had never been to Wasteland. “Auntie, that was me. I wasn’t cleaned up. Now I shaved.”

The woman narrowed her eyes at me and said, “Really, Teacher Plumblossom? That other guy was much better looking than you.”

My runs increased from fourteen- to sixteen- and then eighteen-mile loops, a route that took me further north along the Songhua to the foothills, which seemed to keep receding. The course now edged past drying cornstalks and sunflowers drooping from the weight of their seeds. Although it was autumn, it felt like a second spring: I ran under bright blue skies around pouncing grasshoppers and fiddling crickets, past blossoming thistles and golden dandelions. The fields showed the same colors: green stalks and yellow crowns. After the paddies had been drained, frogs sunned on the drying mud, fattened from their summer bug binge.

Mr. Guan’s teenage niece said I looked “unhealthy,” which in the countryside meant “thinner.” At night she began bringing over her family’s leftovers in an oversize stainless steel bowl—piles of rice and tofu and potatoes—that made me feel like a well-kept pet. After patching its cracks with duct tape, Mr. Guan fired up the
kang
. I stuffed rice stalks into its fire vent, curled against the bed’s warmth on my belly, and dozed like a contented dog.

Low on cash, I walked to the crossroads and pressed the buttons on the Agricultural Bank’s ATM. As a Peace Corps volunteer the previous decade, I had had to fill out multiple tissue-paper slips, then queue at a bank counter and all but beg the teller to release funds from my account. A few times the bank told me to come back later, as it had run out of cash. Now the transaction took one minute: Wasteland’s machine dispensed yuan, still making me feel like I had found a magic portal into money, eight thousand miles from its source.

A man named Mr. Wang managed Wasteland’s bank. He was short and plump and always smiling, though Auntie Yi said his grin concealed marital troubles. I asked how she knew, and she replied, “Everyone knows everything.”

Mr. Wang said that the bank recently tried a pilot program to lend money to farmers to improve their equipment or to start a side business. “The problem is that they have no collateral,” he told me. “They can’t put up their assigned plot of land. We decided they could use their home, but that isn’t worth much. The loans were restricted to such small amounts. Really, if a farmer wants to buy a bunch of chickens and build a coop, he’s not going to come to me and fill out an hour’s worth of paperwork to borrow
300
yuan. He can borrow that from family and friends. What this village needs is more threshing machines. They cost
20
,
000
yuan [$
3
,
200
]. That’s double the cost of an average house here.”

For the past week, Uncle Fu had urged me to buy a fleet of harvesters. “You can rent them daily,” he said. “Your business would be excellent. Now people wait their turn for the machines to come. There’s a list.”

“But outside of this season, the machines would need to be stored, and maintained.”

He considered this. “On second thought,” he said, “Eastern Fortune will soon be responsible for harvesting everything.”

The company rebuilt the arch at the start of Red Flag Road. A new billboard announced that Wasteland was an “eco-agriculture industrialization demonstration region.” San Jiu couldn’t say what that meant, nor could Mr. Guan or any other farmer I asked; none of them had even bothered to read the sign. Then I remembered Dr. Liu, Eastern Fortune’s agronomist, explaining that the company had first labeled its fields a “technological experimental site” because the government had favored those adjectives in
2000
. Now the terms had changed, and the company’s scope had expanded.

Eastern Fortune’s workers, clad in matching red jackets, surveyed the ripened fields with reaping knives, selecting seed grain for the next year. The rice reached above their waists, and the men moving amidst it looked like swimmers in a yellow sea.

The push was on to harvest before Mid-Autumn Festival, a September family-gathering meal that brought the year’s highest demand for the freshest rice. Farmers reaped and threshed across Wasteland. San Jiu finally gave in to his family’s concerns for his health and hired a two-man crew. Their harvester mowed his paddies in a single afternoon.

The drawback to harvesting by machine was that, once the grain was bagged, it needed to be dried and sold lest it turned rancid. Grains cut by hand, however, left the rice kernels attached to their stalks, which could be kept longer and sold when prices rose. But cutting by hand was back-numbing work, done with a forearm-long scythe. The tool was light and sharp, and the strain came not from pulling the blade through the stalks—yanking as much as slicing—but from bending low to cut just above the roots.

Both processes sent plumes of chaff into the air, clouding the horizon, powdering our clothes, and caking our eyes and lips. But in contrast to the machine-harvested fields, the hand-cut stalks were tied into sheaves and piled in shaggy mounds the shape and color of kneeling lions. Wasteland’s prides filled the fields, facing the setting sun.

After threshing the kernels, the rice was spread to dry on cement driveways and lanes—but not on Red Flag Road, or the hot spring’s parking lot, filled as they were with tourists’ cars. In our driveway, for the last time, Mr. Guan smoothed the rice harvested from his family’s plot. Next year the grain would go to Eastern Fortune and be fed into a dryer, then milled and polished by Japanese machines. But now Mr. Guan stepped carefully around his grain’s golden patch. He turned it over with a rake, moving as meditatively as a monk in a Zen sand garden.

At September’s end, a flatbed truck deposited a sedan-size pink granite slab beside Red Flag Road. Drivers about to enter our hamlet now saw, in carved characters painted red:
Wasteland Village
. On the reverse, in smaller characters painted green, I read:
Brief Introduction
.

The rock said the village was founded in
1722
, during the reign of Kangxi, the Manchu emperor who established the Jilin city shipyards. The next carved date was a century later, in
1823
, when a temple was built to a goddess that attracted revelers from across the plains to its New Year’s carnival.

The following entry leapt ahead another hundred years, to
1931
, when Japanese occupied the region. From
1946
to
1947
, the Chinese Nationalists took over administration, falling in
1948
to the Communists.
In
1956
, it became a village.

I expected history to end at that familiar line. But three more dates were listed below it. Kneeling in the squishy new sod to see them, I read that in
1958
Wasteland became part of the Ninth Platform People’s Commune. In
1962
its name changed to the Wasteland Battalion.

I was on all fours now, tilting my head low and sideways. The final entry said:
In
1984
, Wasteland was named a village yet again.

Like its fields, Wasteland’s history spun through seasons, cycling back to the start.